I'll be doin' all I can, If I die an honest man.

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If you read my posts on building a local dev server, you will have seen that I have been using .dev as a local-only TLD. Well .dev was bought by Google and they will apparently be selling domains on it. And to make matters worse, both Chrome and now Firefox have preloaded their browsers with unalterable HSTS settings that require HTTPS for any request to a .dev domain. If you type “http://foo.dev” into your address bar it will ignore what you typed and request, “https://foo.dev” instead. That killed my local sites. More details here:

I want to host a copy of all the websites on which I work, right on the computer where I do my coding. I don’t want to depend on a server on my LAN that won’t be there when I am working from out of the office. I don’t want to work on a remote server that requires a slow (S)FTP loop to try out every change. And I also don’t want to work entirely from the command-line on a remote server. So I set up my macbook with wildcard DNS that points any hostname *.test to localhost (127.0.0.1). If I am working on example.com’s website, I can use “example.test” as a hostname that points right back to my machine. Now I need to set up Apache to host example.test. But adding a virtual host config for every website on which I work is going to be extremely laborious. Luckily Apache supports no-config mass virtual hosts. All I’ll need to do to add a new website for example.test is create an “example/” directory in the right spot.

Apache includes cool “mass virtual hosting” features that will allow it to suss out the DocumentRoot from the request hostname. First, let’s create a directory where our virtual hosts will live:

mkdir ~/Documents/vhosts

I put mine in a folder inside my Documents folder. For my login, that’s /Users/haroldp/Documents/vhosts. But you can put it just about anywhere. I added the following to my /etc/apache2/httpd.conf:

First, note that /Users/haroldp/Documents/vhosts makes sense for me on my computer, but it’s going to be different for everyone, so you can’t just copy & paste. Note that I tacked an /htdocs directory onto the end of my vhosts VirtualDocumentRoot directive. This is not necessary at all, but I like to have directories associated with a website, but outside the webspace. You don’t have to do that if you don’t want. Note too that I setup PHP, because I’ll be using that. You may or may not want those directives.

Then I uncommented the mod_vhost_alias module to enable apache’s mass vhosting directives:

LoadModule vhost_alias_module libexec/apache2/mod_vhost_alias.so

While I was in there I told apache to Listen only on localhost:

Listen 127.0.0.1:80

Because I don’t want anyone else to be able to hit the webserver on my laptop. Just me.

Next I enabled the PHP module by uncommenting:

LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

I set the ServerName so Apache won’t whine about it:

ServerName www.test

I set the ServerAdmin so I know whose fault it is when something doesn’t work:

ServerAdmin haroldp@internal.org

And finally, I changed the user that Apache runs as to my login:

User haroldp
Group staff

WARNING, HIGH VOLTAGE!! This is very dangerous. I’m setting up apache to do its work, including running PHP scripts as my own UID. This means that a naughty script could do anything on my machine that I could, including very bad stuff. I am doing this so things like WordPress will create files with my login instead of the web user, which avoids a lot of hassles, and makes upgrades much easier. I am not worried too much about the security implications because I am running my own code, and the server is only available on localhost. If you are already on the machine, there are easier ways to do bad things.

Ok, let’s check our work:

sudo apachectl configtest

Fix any errors and rerun until Apache starts without issue. Then simply:

sudo apachectl start

If that worked, you should get a (404) page if you go to http://127.0.0.1/ . But let’s try out our virtual hosting:

We want to develop websites or other internet services on our OSX computer. It’s convenient to point wildcard DNS for a whole (imaginary) top level domain to localhost, so we can invent as many domains as we want without having to edit any config files or do any work.

So I had a FreeBSD jail today running a geriatric version of MySQL that was long past time to update. But sometimes when you perform big updates you discover problems along the way, and it takes much longer than usual. This particular jail can’t tolerate a lot of downtime so I thought it would be nice to perform a “practice” upgrade to flush out all of the problems and have solutions ready when I’m ready to perform the live upgrade. My idea was to clone the jail and perform a practice upgrade on that. It was easy.

First, clone the file system. That’s easy because I keep all of my jails on their own ZFS file systems and maintain daily snapshots:

zfs clone zroot/jails/vhost2@daily.0 zroot/jails/vhost2upgrade

And of course that happens pretty much instantly.

Next I found a free IP address on the server, created a new jail and started it up:

An even better setup would be if I had set up my jail with server and user data on separate partitions. Then, once I had the server data working the way I wanted, I could zfs promote the clone’s server partition. To do.

You have a large (90MB) PDF on your Mac (OSX Yosemite) and your iPad (iOS 9.2) would be the perfect place to read it. How do you get this file from your desktop computer onto a *decent* reader on your tablet?

Things that don’t work:

Plug it into your computer via Thunderbolt/USB and copy it over. NO PEASANT! The iPad does NOT have a file system! Stop pretending it does! Do not look behind the curtain! This does work on my Kindle Fire, and takes about 8 seconds, of course. And then you discover that there isn’t a decent PDF reader… on the computer sold by the book company. Ugh.

Use iTunes to move it over. Nope. iTunes (v12.x) no longer manages “books”. There is no “Books” tab in iTunes anymore. Also, as a side note, iTunes as a user interface for playing music has gotten iteratively worse every single version since they bought (and killed) SoundJam to create it. The user interface organization is now *profoundly* bad. I am using WinAmp to play MP3s now. I kid you not.

Use iBooks to copy it over. Nope. iBooks (v1.2) no longer has a “Devices” list that allows you to simply drag things around.

Email it to yourself. Just, “No”. I said it’s 90M – SMTP will explode. Honestly, I seriously considered just upping my email size limits to 90M (over 100M after my mail client base64 encodes that) for a day to try this anyway, since I run my own mail server, hah. Emailing things to myself makes me sad though. It’s basically admitting defeat.

Download it through your iPad’s web browser. Nope. Then I have to READ it in the browser, and the browser is a shitty reader. This is a 700+ page PDF. There doesn’t seem to be any way to move the PDF to a decent reader. Maybe if I wrote a script that specifically set a “Content-disposition” header, mobile Safari would give me the option to download/save/open in iBooks? Don’t think I won’t code that for one PDF!

Use AirDrop. Nope, I can copy the file over via AirDrop, and I have the option to open it with iBooks or Kindle reader, but it never shows up in either. Also, as the iPad has no file system, and I downloaded it three times trying to make this happen, do I now have 270MB of mystery bloat that I can’t see or delete? I wonder, all tolled, how many completely unavailable copies of this 90MB file I now have on the iPad.

Send to Kindle on your desktop, and sync it on your iPad. Nope, Amazon has a 50MB limit. Books copied to your Kindles via the file system aren’t part of Amazon’s “system” and don’t get synced to other devices.

Import the book into Calibre and use it’s “Send to device” function. Nope. Calibre used iTunes to send books to iPads, and iTunes has removed it’s book support so that doesn’t work anymore.

Solved:

Upload the file to ownCloud/Dropbox/Box and then sync on your iPad. DING! DING! Copy the PDF to your ownCloud (etc…) folder, upload the #@$$# thing to your server in a colo in another state, then on your iPad, re-download the file back to your LAN via the ownCloud app. ownCloud is great, but it’s a poor book reading app of course. Next click the unlabeled and inscrutable [^] “Share” button and find the “Open in…” option, and choose iBooks. Jesus-fuck!

Apple and many others have seized on this idea that the file system is the most difficult thing in computing for new/casual users to understand, and the only way to save those users from the pitfalls of a real file system is to abstract it away and hide it. Fuck you! I won’t deny that dealing with a file system *is* a problem, but sweeping it under the rug is an insane solution. It’s like saying that the hardest part of marriage is communication, so married couples should ONLY communicate through approved Halmark brand greeting card quotations or Top 40 song lyrics. Fucking no! The solution is to learn to communicate! Computers save stuff in files, and they organize those files in a folder tree. Learn that, gawd damnit!

I feel like I am constantly beating my head against Apple’s insistance that the filesystem must be hidden from the user.

I present once again, the List of Books I Read Last Year! 2015 was a banner year for me, as I managed to read 20 books! That’s double last year’s count. If you are wondering what my secret was, I just read much shorter books in 2015. I should have thought of that sooner. Almost everything I read on my now “old” Kindle Keyboard. It lasted another year.

This is an old hippy classic. I have to say, I didn’t care for “Trout Fishing” much. I liked a few of the poems in the middle section, but I found them uneven. But the Watermelon Sugar novella was just completely delightful – a unique, possibly post-apocalyptic, fantasy story. I can’t think of anything like it.

JavaScript: The Good Parts
Douglas Crockford

A dense technical book on what to use, and what to avoid in JS. I think I read through the Object chapter four times. I’m still blown away by his method for building private properties with closures.

Meh, I think this suffered from being written too soon. The Infinite Jest wiki is a lot better in many ways.

Goodbye to All That
Robert Graves

I enjoyed this WWI memoir, though I felt like he wrote about his time in combat with too much detachment.

The Trial
Franz Kafka

You know that dream you have where you are in your home, except everything is different and confusing, and there are things hidden behind doors that you didn’t know were there, and you have some strange imperative you must complete? The vicious bureaucracy – dream-like in its intricacy and absurdity in The Trial – have exactly that quality. This was one of the best books I read in 2015, and it’s a recommended read for absolutely everyone. This is the book that defines, Kafkaesque.

Reaper Man
Terry Pratchett

We lost Terry Pratchett last year, but thankfully he wrote many books, and this was another fun one.

Dive Into HTML5
Mark Pilgrim

We have been using HTML5 for years already, of course, but have you done your homework and really studied the whole thing? If not, this is available for free on the internets.

Iron Council
China Miéville

This was the third (and last) novel set in the rich, sinister, dark, dirty, straight-up filthy Bas-Lag. I can’t recommend this series enough. It’s “fantasy” I guess, but definately its own unique variety. It ain’t “swords and wizards” fantasy. This book hasn’t been as popular as the preceding two, and maybe I’d only give it 9/10, which is to say, I absolutely loved it, and loved going back to Bas-Lag.

Civil War Stories
Ambrose Bierce

Bierce is probably most famous now for his, “Devil’s Dictionary.” But this is a wonderful collection of fictional episodes from the Civil War, most with a “twist” ending. It’s a great book from beginning to end, but An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge was particularly striking.

Homage to Catalonia
George Orwell

This is Orwell’s memoir of his time fighting with the anarchists against the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. It adds so much depth to his politics and the loathing he developed for Soviet communism. It starts out as story of deprivation in WWI style trench warfare, but picks up steam as he finds himself in the city fighting the propaganda and treachery of his supposed allies.

The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles

This was beautifully written, but I had a hard time identifying with the main characters. It reminded me of Camus’ The Stranger: people in North Africa making terrible decisions.

The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler

This was fun, and I was a little surprised by how closely the old Bogart movie stuck to the book. The notable difference was that Chandler’s vices, victims and villains were all a little dirtier. General Sternwood says, “A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy,” which is of course just what I’m doing reading a noir detective novel.

Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe

I enjoyed this story of the colonization and missionary conversion in East Africa from the point of view of an African tribesman.

1984
George Orwell

So the whole family (Bean, Annabel and I) read or re-read 1984 this year. It was very interesting to put this novel, which is so important to me, in context with Homage to Catalonia and Orwell’s experiences in the Spanish Civil War. And it’s cool that I now have the experience of this book in common with my daughter.

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Cormac McCarthy

This western begins with the tightest, most tersely told history of a boy growing up to become an outlaw. Every step unfolds like math, so clearly coming out of the last. Every page contains a horror more shocking that the previous. It was an amazing read.

Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh

I mostly enjoyed the book, but the ending felt like a shabby advertisement for Catholicism. I felt pretty let down. Along with Goodbye to All that, this book surprised me a little with just how gay the English aristocracy of a century ago was.

The Lathe of Heaven
Ursula K Le Guin

I enjoyed this imaginative science fiction novel about dreams coming true in the worst possible ways, by one of my favorite authors.

Civil Disobedience
Henry David Thoreau

Every other sentence in this tract is another perfect poem about liberty. I felt like jumping up an down in agreement most of the time I was reading. It’s amazing to think that myself and all of the good an kind people I know, take a significant portion of their income, and give it to people so they can use it to murder an oppress other people. We pay money so the government will put utterly harmless people in cages for victimless “crimes”. We pay money to bomb brown people out in West Dirtistan with robot airplanes. We pay to have our phone calls and emails recorded. If I do not pay my taxes because supporting that bruises my concise too much, I’ll be just another “tax dodger” who’s trying to avoid doing his, “fair share”. Well Thoreau went to jail rather than support slavery and the Mexican-American war and wrote this book about why that was the right thing to do.

Sacred and Secular Elegies
George Barker

Ok, book porn here! So I was listening to the audio book of Hunter S Thompson’s Songs of the Doomed, and there’s an out-take of some chatter that’s a little hard to hear between stories where Thompson reads a few lines from the last stanza of Sacred Elegy #5, by George Barker. The poem is pretty amazing, so I tracked it down. It’s way out of print, but I found a copy retired from some high school library. When I punched it into goodreads.com, it had never been submitted before, so the picture of the book on goodreads is actually mine. You can see the library marks in the corner. The book itself is very short, but the poems are so dense and impressionistic, it actually took a while to get through it. And amusingly enough, I felt that the last poem, Sacred Elegy #5, was easily the best.

One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez

I just finished this before the new year, and enjoyed it tremendously. Keep a family tree handy for the family that this book of magical realism follows through seven generations. They keep naming one generation after the last, and it’s easy to get lost. Great book, in any case.

I develop websites on my laptop using a local web server. Often those sites have functions that send out email, and that needs to be tested, along with everything else. It can be a problem when some function sends out lots of emails to customers, admins, affiliates – a bunch of people. If I’m working with a copy of the “live” database to debug some problem, it might try to send emails to places I don’t want (real customers). What would be nice is if it generated those emails, but just wrote them to a file on disk where I could look at them.

This is pretty easy to do with Postfix, my MTA of choice and the one that ships with my OSX laptop. First, add a line to the end of /etc/postfix/master.cf:

It should run as user _www, which is the UID my web server runs as. The mail files created with have 0600 permissions, so only the owner can read them. More on that later.

The pipe argv is set to tee (tee has a man page you can read), to split output to a file. And that file is in a directory in my websites folder. Each file will be named using the postfix queue ID and the recipient. I thought that would be sufficiently unique for my needs.

When that is saved, we need to create the directory to collect those emails and make it writable by the fs_mail process:

If you are setting this up on your own computer, you will want to adjust the directory location to your suit your needs.

Now we need to tell postfix to use our new service for all outgoing email. Edit /etc/postfix/mail.cf adding the following:

default_transport = fs_mail

That should do it. Restart postfix and check your mail log for any errors:

sudo postfix stop
sudo postfix start
tail /var/log/mail.log

If that all looks good we can test by sending an email from the command line:

% mail haroldp@internal.org
Subject: test #42
This is a test message. End it by typing a period (.) on its own line, and hitting return.
.
EOT

Check your mail.log again to see that it worked without error. Check your new spool directory to see if there is a mail file in there.

If that is working, then you are done! But remember that we saved those messages as UID _www? That is the default user ID of apache web processes on OSX, so my local web server can read those files. For extra credit build a web page to view the 10 newest emails in your spool dir:

So I managed to read ten books in 2014. I’m still loving my Kindle Keyboard, but I may have just about worn it out. Something is rattling around inside, and occasionally I have to reboot it. I read six books on the Kindle. I read one on the new Kindle Fire that I won at Hack4Reno because it was a PDF tech book with lots of formatting and just not great on the e-ink display. Three were good old dead tree books. If a book is not available for my Kindle though, I will seriously just consider reading something else. I still have a hellova backlog. Here’s what I read in 2014:

King Harald’s Saga
Snorri Sturluson

The original biography of King Harold Hardrada, one of history’s most interesting characters. The story of his exploits, generally regarded as true, are absolutely shocking. You should at least read his wikipedia page.

The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft
H.P. Lovecraft

Just a step to the left of Lovecraft’s better known horror stories are, I think, his best works. They all have a pervasive mood of unease, because, I think, you can still sense something horrible is just offstage. But they are, you know, dreamy. I’ve found myself rereading my favorite, the 9 page, “Strange High House in the Mist,” at least yearly since high school. It’s lyric and beautiful and a just short of scary.

Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace

But so yeah, this is how I spent my summer. 1100 pages, like 200 pages of end-notes – some chapter-long that themselves have dozens of end-notes. Crazy, encyclopedic references on dozens of subjects; Hamlet, etymology, drugs, cinema, tv, advertising, tennis, rehab, Canada, etc, on and on. This thing was insane and wonderful. It was the best book of the year. But so then, you know how you get to that last chapter of a mystery novel where the detective gathers everyone in the parlor and cuts through all the hints and misdirections and reveals the murderer? This book is like that with the last chapter missing. You just wake up on the beach with a bad hangover wondering what happened to your summer, and you have to puzzle it out for yourself.

The Strangest Town in Alaska: The History of Whittier, Alaska and the Portage Valley
Alan Taylor

Great book for anyone who grew up in Whittier. I learned a ton of stuff I didn’t know. My favorite bit of trivia was that when Columbus first landed in the new world, Whittier was still under about a mile of glacier. That’s crazy, but I look at Portage Glacier on Google Maps now, and it’s just about gone, and I guess I can’t doubt it.

Stars of the New Curfew
Ben Okri

Down and out in West Africa. It’s fun to peak into other worlds.

Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino

This was a fun collection of short of vigenettes of imaginary cities, as told to Kublai Khan by Marco Polo. It has that fairy tale feel of Lord Dunsany. Very enjoyable read.

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
Italo Calvino

This was a strange and difficult and wonderful post-modern book about… well about reading books. A man begins to read a book but there is a problem, and he can’t continue. He reads books alone, with a friend, out loud, a manuscript, a journal, letters, in translation, examining how those are all different experiences, always starting but but never getting to finish them. It has a little romance, a little intrigue, ten (10) first chapters of ten very compelling books, a lot of talking to the fourth wall, and it actually all comes together in the end. I highly recommend this!

The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X and Alex Haley

Politics aside, this is a fantastic and vivid biography. There’s a lot of detail missing from the popular image of Malcolm X.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
David Foster Wallace

DFW’s editor sends him to report on things chosen to make him maximally uncomfortable.

Developing Backbone.js Applications
Addy Osmani

I love that Backbone is a very general library, and not overly-opinionated about how JS apps should be structured, but gawd it’s idiosyncratic! I can follow it, but how well can I write it? It seems like your choice of JS client frameworks is still a head-or-gut proposition. I’m going to keep practicing, anyway.

So I went to the Self-Employed Christmas Party that The Hub threw, and did the socially-awkward-penguin thing for two hours. It was fun, and that red wine from Craft was quite nice. But on the way out the door going to the party, I couldn’t find my real business cards and just had some calling cards with my personal phone and a URL for this mostly-stagnant blog. If you got here from one of those, well sorry. This is just WordPress with the simplest theme I could find. Give me a call, and I’ll show you something better. Merry Christmas.

Here’s an excerpt from Douglas Adam’s So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. It does a good job of summing up the problem with America’s two-party system.

“I come in peace,” it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, “take me to your Lizard.”

Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this [deletia]

“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see…”

“You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”

“No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”

“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”

“I did,” said ford. “It is.”

“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?”

“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”

“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”

“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”

“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”

“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?”

“What?”

“I said,” said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, “have you got any gin?”

“I’ll look. Tell me about the lizards.”

Ford shrugged again.

“Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them,” he said. “They’re completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone’s got to say it.”